Entertainment is not a one-size-fits-all world. We want you to be able to choose the hardware that makes sense for you, so we are working with multiple partners to bring a variety of Steam gaming machines to market during 2014, all of them running SteamOS.

Where Sony and Microsoft follow the iOS model for consoles, Valve is aiming for the Android model, including Valve's own line of 'Nexus' devices. As Valves notes, no restrictions - you can change the hardware, software, and install any operating system you want. The right approach, obviously.

Engineers from Valve and NVIDIA have spent a lot of time collaborating on a common goal for SteamOS: to deliver an open-platform gaming experience with superior performance and uncompromising visuals directly on the big screen.

NVIDIA engineers embedded at Valve collaborated on improving driver performance for OpenGL; optimizing performance on NVIDIA GPUs; and helping to port Valve's award-winning content library to SteamOS; and tuning SteamOS to lower latency, or lag, between the controller and onscreen action.

This is going to be big. After being defeated in mobile, it seems Microsoft is facing another frontal assault on another one of its strongholds: gaming, whether it be Windows or Xbox.

I just hope that by pushing SteamOS and SteamMachines, publishers will finally be more aware about Linux environment and will put more optimizations in the overall integration of their games with Linux system.

It's not even about the "need" to have ~3 fps more on Linux than Windows.

I'm talking about stuff like proper multihead display support: some games have bogus detection of the current resolution and treat the whole desktop space as one monitor. This results in "playing" the game in resolutions like 4000x1200 -- not even close to an acceptable gaming option! I've never seen this behavior on Windows.

There are also details like cursor locking in the game window -- well, if the game doesn't cooperate with two monitors, lets put it into a window. But then the mouse cursor isn't locked inside this window and the pointer slips through window bounds. Tough luck!

Worst part is that these kind of problems are probably very easy to fix. Proper multihead detection is a matter of calling the right APIs (since a ton of other software, like AwesomeWM for example, does this right). Proper cursor locking is a matter of calling the right API to grab the cursor.

But someone has to think about doing it before it's done. And I hope that by pushing SteamOS more developers will do this kind of thinking